


Sneedronningen

by MElizabethPenn



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sneedronningen | The Snow Queen - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, BAMF Molly Hooper, Childhood Friends, Epic Friendship, F/M, Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen, Sherlock is a Damsel in Distress, Teenagers, With a Wee Bit of Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-15
Updated: 2015-01-15
Packaged: 2018-03-07 17:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3177657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MElizabethPenn/pseuds/MElizabethPenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock and Molly are best friends, until the shards of a wicked mirror turn his heart to ice and his sight sour. Then, suddenly, the Snow Queen whisks him away, and it's up to Molly to search out the Winter Castle to find him and bring him back.</p><p>A retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen, with a Sherlock twist!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sneedronningen

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not sure how many chapters this will be, or how long it will take. I'm finally getting back into writing after a long hiatus, and without a beta reader, so please be kind. If you would like to be said beta reader, by all means please let me know. I would be most grateful. And please review, and let me know what you think! I'd love to hear from you. :)  
> Now! On to the fairy tale!
> 
> Don't own, don't sue, and all that jazz.

Once upon a time, there were two children. Oh, but I suppose I must start much much earlier than that… Once upon a time, before there were two children, there was a mirror. But this was no ordinary mirror. It was an enchanted mirror. 

Now, I’m sure you’ve heard many stories about enchanted mirrors, many of them exciting and lovely. But I’m afraid that this mirror was neither exciting nor lovely. This mirror belonged to a horrible man, who went by a single name. Moriarty. And this mirror, it didn’t show just a simple reflection. Oh, no. It hid the beautiful and lovely things and magnified the unsightly and horrible things so that anything shown in the mirror was too ugly to bear. Moriarty had great fun with this mirror. He loved to create a variety of mischief with it. His particular favourite was to thrust the mirror in front of unsuspecting passers-by, startling them into believing that the reflection was their true appearance, and sending them rushing into the nearest washroom. 

But then one day, something horrible happened. The mirror broke. This may seem to be not such a horrible thing, that such a wicked object was broken. But what Moriarty did next with the pieces is what made this incident so terrible. He swept up the pieces and gathered them into his hands, and then _blew_. There was definitely something of the diabolical in the bloodstream of the Moriarty clan, because this was no ordinary puff of air. No, of course not. When Moriarty blew, all the pieces went flying everywhere, and travelled such great distances, that there had to be some sort of evil magic involved. And the pieces were all of such different sizes, that they wound up in a wide variety of places. But a great many of the very tiny almost invisible ones wound up in people’s eyes and in people’s hearts. The eyes that these pieces inhabited became much like the mirror had been when it was whole. They only saw the horrible and nasty things about other people and places and things, and none of the lovely things. But the worst were the hearts that these nasty little shards wormed their way into. Those hearts became hard and frozen into such cold little lumps, that the people became cold and hard as well, and said and did such unbearably nasty things to the people that they usually loved and who loved them.

And this brings us back to those two children, who really weren’t children after all. At least not in the sense that certain people would see someone as a child. In all actuality, they were right in the middle, caught in that maddening time that exists halfway between leaving childhood and entering into the world of grown-ups. Not still a child but not yet an adult. And these two young persons of such middling age lived in a place called London, in a time not too far removed from our own. Their names were Sherlock and Molly, and they had been friends for as long as they could remember. Their families had lived in the same two houses on Baker Street for the past two decades, and as a result, Sherlock and Molly had spent much of their childhood playing together in the little laboratory they had set up for themselves in the upstairs of Sherlock's flat.

Now, Sherlock had gotten his name because he had had the great misfortune to have been born with a great big shock of bright blonde hair that had caused his parents to saddle him with the rather unusual (and in his opinion, unfortunate) moniker. And then the hair that had inspired that name had the absolute cheek to darken as he grew older, so that by the time he was eighteen, it had become a rather dark chestnut shade instead. This led to a lot of confused glancing at his hair when people learned his name and the meaning thereof. He was a rather serious boy, who was quite sweet and personable when he wanted to be, but tended to keep to himself most of the time, and as a result had little to no friends. He was incredibly clever, having a gift for observing to a high degree, and remembering vast amounts of information. He fancied himself to be a bit of detective, solving puzzles here and there as he came across them. 

As for Molly, well she was really Margaret, and as her name would suggest, she was a pearl that most people didn’t really notice upon first glance. Still, she was a bright young thing, all rosy cheeks with upturned nose and a shy little smile that had the tendency to inspire the confidences of many. She may not have been conventionally pretty according to the societal norms, but by the age of sixteen, she couldn’t have been purported to have the makings of a spinster. She had a bit of a fancy for anatomy and medicine, and it may have made some of her teachers and classmates a bit uneasy, the relish with which she performed dissections during biology. But those slight quirks aside, she still had a modest circle of friends that she spent a reasonable amount of time with. But the person she spent the most time with, of course, was Sherlock. Differences in social circles and personal schedules aside, the two were inseparable. The easy friendship of their childhood had segued into a comfortable camaraderie that saw them spending much of their time after school and on the weekends in each other’s company. But that all changed late one winter afternoon in February, as they were walking home from school. 

For a long time now, they had been spending the last afternoon of every week with Grandmother Hudson, who lived in the flat beneath Sherlock’s family. She had a great big book of fairy tales that she would read aloud for them. There were all sorts of stories in that old book. It was a rather large and heavy volume, one that required the use of one’s arms and lap to hold comfortably. It was bound in rich red leather, and the pages were thick and yellowed with age. It looked as if it had been written by some great wizard or scholar from ages gone by. Grandmother Hudson had read all the stories to them so many times over, that they both knew all of the stories by heart.  
And this particular February afternoon, Grandmother Hudson chose to read them the story of the Snow Queen. She told them about the snow bees that flitted about on snowy days, and about the queen who ruled them, a cold and often cruel mistress. As she read to them, snowflakes began to fall from the sky, big fat flakes that stuck together and soon had created a thin film across the streets and buildings and pavements. And as Sherlock glanced out the window, for a brief moment he thought he saw the shape of a tall woman, standing across the street and staring at him through the window. 

She was tall and stately, with dark hair somewhat similar to his own. Hers was long, and flowed unbound down her back. She was clothed in pure white, just a few shades paler than her own skin, and a crown of snow and icicles rested just above her brow. The only colour in her face came from her bright crimson lips, the corners of which were quirked in a wry smirk, and her piercing grey-blue eyes that bored into him. As his eyes locked with hers, she inclined her head to him. He blinked, and then all of a sudden she was gone. Had he imagined her? He shivered, prompting a concerned look from Molly as she sat beside him. He shrugged it off, and she let it go, the only sign of her continued attention being the press of her shoulder against his as she leaned into him. Sherlock still felt as if someone was staring at him, but the dark lady clad in white made no reappearance that afternoon. 

The next day, as they were walking down to the grocers to do some errands for their parents, something happened that changed the courses of their lives forever. Sherlock looked up, perhaps at a passing bird or an aeroplane. But it was just at that moment that a piece of Moriarty’s mirror fell out of the sky and into his eye. He blinked furiously as his eyes teared up, but the fierce irritation soon subsided. Instantly after, yet another piece, slightly larger than the other, lodged into his heart, and almost immediately it began to turn his heart to ice. What had started out as a companionable walk, soon grew sour, as Sherlock began to point out all the horrid things in their surroundings, and in her. After they reached the grocer’s, he soon abandoned her and she was left to complete her shopping alone. 

After that day, Sherlock changed. He slowly stopped coming to listen to Grandmother Hudson’s stories, and he rarely talked to Molly anymore except to point out her faults and to be quarrelsome with her. It nearly broke Molly’s heart to see the once kind and serious boy turn into a cold and oftentimes cruel young man. He used his massive intellect and clever words in terrible ways, usually to show off with no regard for the feelings of others. It was almost a relief to many when, one day in early spring, Sherlock suddenly disappeared. Since Molly had been seeing less and less of him, she wasn’t initially concerned. However, when several of the neighbourhood boys reported having seen him go off with a dark haired woman swathed in white furs and wearing an icy crown, Molly began to worry. Sherlock’s parents filed a report with the police, and a search was conducted, but it yielded no results. It was only then that Molly remembered Grandmother Hudson’s story about the Queen of the snow bees. The boys’ story of a woman dressed in white, and the crown matched up so well to the story in the big leather bound book, that Molly could only come to one conclusion; Sherlock had been kidnapped.

And that, dear reader, is where our story really begins.


End file.
